30 October 2010

Wounded Galaxies

White vinyl, snake's tail thick; an exquisite package... the cover, the inserts, the poetry, the fact that Stephen Thrower's starting to look a little like Kempernorton (who's been churning goodies all over the shop)... this is a real release, in all senses of the word...

I have plenty of records that try to sound like this; there's thousands out there and almost every one of them should look at this and start over... this is music for people who know, who understand where this music comes from, who get that this music is sometimes out there, waiting to be heard; it's music you might glimpse out of the corner of your eye, to synaesthesise a little... music that just is, is found in fragments and then pieced together majestically...

(not channelled, Christ no...)

Previous Cyclobe albums have been a little dense for me... I've struggled to listen to them all the way through...

I have found that previous Cyclobe tracks worked best in mixes, in amongst other sources of light and air... I liked them but they worked as counterpoint, as a stirring, they only sounded truly beautiful against other songs...

this one is an entirely different proposition...

there's lots of sound, snake tumbling charms, drones, bagpipes, eastern melodies but there's also lots of air and the result is something of an aural eqivalent to Hermes Caduceus, with the melodies and drones winding their way around a central motif - hand drums, flute signatures, pipe hum - occasionally taking gentle flight...

...there's voices here and there, some definitely real, others imagined... there's moments which could be Hermes chastising Pan... there's often a statesmanlike quality to this music... these guys have seen it all, are reflecting on the chasms, not stumbling towards them... they've looked into the void, let it look back and then started to consider what it means to them.... this is clearly music born from Pan(ic) and vine and frivolity but it's never frivolous... there's no Balance in there, running around in a Jester's hat, swinging on the light cords...except for the odd few bars of Jim Foetus-like intensity

(horn stabs as Pan running across the grassland, as Hermes/Mercury remembering their youth?)

Oh fuck it: I love this album, have played it five times right the way through already... if you want an easy reference then of course there's Coil (some of the instrumentals on Scatology, Chaostrophy, bits from Stolen And Contaminated) but these are references of intent and understanding, not sound... Cyclobe have their own slurs and whirls... sound like themselves: truly psychedelic, truly steeped in occult traditions and hidden reverses and truly magnificent...